Crispin Hull

Whenever you hear your favourite warm and cuddly ACT Minister utter the word “”consultation” freeze.

Go back over the sentence and ask what does it really mean. “”Consultation” is the buzz word. Nothing happens without consultation. Well, last week the ACT Government got caught.

The story starts a year ago when the Minister for Idle Youth, Terry Connolly, noted seething masses of drunken, smoking yobs crowding the bars and clubs of Canberra, mostly in upstairs or downstairs hideaways with narrow entrances.

He quite rightly asked: what if there were a fire? The youth would fry. Something had to be done. A law had to be passed.
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The Opposition’s fossilised response the ACT Budget got only half the story.

Kate Carnell called it the Jurrasic Park Budget _ a simile that is destined for clichedom over its next 160 million uses. She was comparing the ACT Government to another extinct lifeform _ Stalinism. While other governments were adapting and privatising the unfit ACT Government was batting on with State ownership of property and the means of production and exchange, she said.

Carnell could have used the Jurrasic Park analogy to better effect. Quite recently palaeontologists grovelling in the Badlands of Wyoming discovered an unknown attribute of dinosaurs: they were social animals which lived in groups and nurtured their young after hatching.
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Molonglo, Brindabella and Ginninderra were confirmed in the Gazette yesterday as the names for the three electorates for the ACT Legislative Assembly.

It rejected the name Namadgi for the southern seat, saying it could not authenticate it as an Aboriginal name.

The boundaries were also confirmed. The confirmation came from the augmented ACT Electoral Commission which hears final objections after the earlier publication of the Redistribution Committee’s findings.

Those findings stand. Ginninderra (five seats) will comprise Belconnen and Hall. Brindabella (five seats) will comprise Tuggeranong and the Woden suburbs of Torrens, Pearce and Chifley and the southern remainder of the ACT. Molonglo (seven seats) will comprise North and South Canberra, Gungahlin, Weston Creek and Woden (exclusing Torrens, Chiefley and Pearce).
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Add pars to hospice story…..cut in as you can.

The Minister for Heatlh, Wayne Berry, denounced the decsions as outrageous and obstructionist.

The NCPA had rejected the ACT’s first choice of site and then had put up technical objections to its other choice on the QEII site in Civic.
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What a delight to see politicians thinking more than three years ahead.

When the federal executive dumped on the ACT branch of the ALP yesterday it had little to do with the pre-selection of sitting members of the ACT Legislative Assembly. And little, indeed, to do with sitting Federal Members. The real issue was pre-selection for the third ACT federal seat which, according to present population trends, must be created before the next election.

Now the third seat will almost inevitably an ALP one. Mr Gerry Mander himself would have difficulty weaving a boundary line through Red Hill, Forest and Weetangera to form a Tory seat. John Haslem won Canberra for the Liberals in 1975 in the anti-Gough landslide and then retained it having proved himself the local Member par excellence in 1977. But it was a two-election wonder. The ACT is a Labor stronghold.
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Tppointments to all boards, statutory authorities and councils would have to be made by Assembly committees under legislation proposed by Independent MLA Michael Moore.

He said yesterday that he was confident he had the numbers in the Assembly to get the law through.

The move comes after the Opposition criticised two appointments of prominent Labor Party members to statutory offices by Labor Ministers.
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The Department of Administrative Services had not referred the Australian Capital Auctions matter to Australian Securities Commission, an ASC spokesman said yesterday.

A departmental officer told the Senate Estimates committee, “”The matter has also been referred to the fraud people in the AFP and the Australian Securities Commission”.

Australian Capital Auctions was the trade name of Sale-O Pty Ltd which went into liquidation owing the Federal Government and others more than $1 million.
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Betterment charges on lease-purpose changes were substantially increased yesterday.

Betterment is charged according to the change in the value of a lease from the old use to the new, for example when someone wants to build a block of units where there was a single house.

Under the old rules, when calculating the “”before value”, some consideration could be given to its potential for redevelopment.

Under the change announced yesterday by the Minister for Environment, Land and Environment, Bill Wood, no consideration will be allowed for redevelopment potential when assessing the “”before value”. He said that when areas were flagged for redevelopment the “”before value” rose almost to the same as the “”after value”, thus resulting in very little betterment charge.
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The blame for Canberra’s high petrol prices “”quite clearly lies with the oil companies”, the Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, said yesterday.

“”They are milking the Territory for all they can get,” she said.

Ms Follett was addressing a post-Budget business breakfast. She said the Government intended to put pressure on the oil companies by ensuring an independent operator opened in Canberra to promote competition. She defended the half-cent-a-litre rise in petrol franchise tax, saying it would bring it in to line with NSW. It would protect the revenue base. The earlier aim of having a lower tax than NSW was to produce lower petrol prices. That had failed.

The Government’s move to bring an independent operator would help local service-station operators.
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The ACT Budget put looking after mates before good financial management, the Leader of the Opposition, Kate Carnell, told the Assembly yesterday.

She called for smarter thinking in the public sector as was happening elsewhere in Australia. She said, however, that Labor was too scared to take on the unions to create more efficient government. The inefficiency and looking after mates were affecting Canberrans’ standard of living.

“”To the majority of Canberrans, this budget represents all that was odious about self-government,” she said. “”The fears of the people in 1989, of ending up with an inefficient government that continues to cost more and more, with no direction, and without the guts to make the hard decisions, is exactly what the people have got.”

The budget was about more spending, more taxes, more borrowing and more tinkering at the edges.
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